Lost Cause
Two years on, this city still has the capacity to completely humiliate me.
One moment’s disorientation as I start driving home from a gig (I know, I know, I got there okay), and all of a sudden it’s as if I’ve been teleported into a different world, the world that I used to see as a kid with my nose pressed against the glass as the bus from Adelaide rolled in after thirteen hours: busy, somehow exotic and exciting … and completely unfamiliar. Before long I had driven three times in the same confused and disoriented circle. A circle which included, embarrassingly enough, a breath testing station. I only got pulled over once (which, incidentally, was my second breath test in two days, after not having one in the last two years), but I’m pretty sure that at least one of the cops was having a quiet giggle to himself as he ripped the glad wrap off another white plastic blowing tube.
In the end, out came the Melways, and 180 degrees later I was pointing in the right direction. All of this happened within about five kilometres of my house. I only have to get a little bit off one of the corridors that I drive on all the time, and I might as well be navigating in Istanbul. (In fact, even in Istanbul, I was never this lost).
Passing Notes
I thought that this was going to be another piss-boring article about picking up by text message, but I was wrong.
There’s a gentle murmur over by the bar area, admittedly, but it gives way to quiet coughs and stifled giggles in the designated Silent Area. Here, talking at any level is banned, and partygoers — mostly singles — communicate with just body language and the pens and paper provided. “Once this playful foundation mixes with a little alcohol, inhibitions disappear and notes begin to fly,” says Quiet Party co-founder Paul Rebhan.
This would have been a hundred wet dreams come true for me when I was adolescent and single and horny (which is to say, when I was adolescent). It’s not that I was shy, particularly, at least no more so than a normal quietly- (but well-) spoken person. It’s just that a) in talking to any girl that I fancied, I was totally bloody hopeless, and b) when it came to writing, I kicked arse. I literally used to fantasize about living in a time (or, at least, living in the world which Jane Austen and her ilk presented as existing during the time) when you could write a girl a love letter and she’d spontaneously blush and swoon and melt and moisten. (Okay, maybe I read Jane Austen between the lines somewhat). In reality, if I’d tried it, they’d have melted and blushed, but more from embarrassment than from amour.
I suspect that amongst bloggers I’m not alone in welcoming the renaissance of written communication. As it happened, though, my love life sorted itself out eventually, despite my dry-mouthed, blank-minded romantic incompetence. Despite, also, my one attempt at seduction by email, which, shall we say, was not a good advertisement for the power of the written word (and not because it was unsuccessful, not as such.)
It might be true that this difficult time might have been made easier if I’d had all these terrific tools available, but not easy enough for me to ever want to go through it again.
Spinville
Tim Blair doing his thing in The Bulletin:
MARK COLVIN, host of ABC radio’s PM program, ran into Mike Moore recently (the good Mike Moore, that is: the former World Trade Organisation boss, not the big fat rich guy who makes the lame commie movies). Moore’s responses to Colvin’s predictable anti-free-trade comments included: “I don’t know where the hell you’re coming from on this”, “That is not an actual argument”, “What’s the deal, what is the contradiction?” and “You know, what I’m getting from you is a very negative attitude on all this, it’s always you start with ‘but this’, ‘but that’.”
(It’s the first time that I’d had a look at Blair’s output from his day job. My first reaction was to be surprised that lazy gratuitious sneers like “commie” and “leftoid”, which appears elsewhere, had made the transition from the blogosphere to the printed page, but leaving that aside for the moment … )
Tim Blair, like Richard Alston, should realise that all these ABC programmes are online and easy to Google up. Anyone who is interested can place the rant in context. Have a listen.
Now, Mark Colvin is talking to a former WTO boss who is obviously in favour of free trade. I would have imagined that Tim, as a journalist, would expect these views to be tested against an opposing view. That’s one thing I don’t understand about proponents of ABC bias theory: they seem to expect guests to be bowled cherries by interviewers. If anything, I’d say that Colvin missed opportunities to raise difficult questions. For instance, defending Western fast food chains against the charge that the rise in red meat consumption in the third world had been driven by them, Moore said:
I go… I went to Africa seven times in three years - I saw people very, very hungry, small, malnutrition et cetera. How do we liberate those people, give them more choices?
[…]
We’re here, I hope to create more jobs, wealthier societies, stronger economies, better development in the poorer countries by liberating their agricultural potential.
Agricultural potential which, it should perhaps have been pointed out, can best be realised by growing grain crops rather than raising livestock.
Getting back to Blair’s snipe, I think it’s worth looking carefully at this quote:
“That is not an actual argument”, “What’s the deal, what is the contradiction?”
Firstly, it’s a misquote. Moore said “That is an actual argument”. I thought so when I listened to it, and the transcription on the website agrees. Secondly, it needs to be placed in context:
MARK COLVIN: Do you buy the American argument that American companies and the American consumer are effectively subsidising the innovation that brings us drugs and effectively creates a situation where we can have our PBS?
MIKE MOORE: That is an actual argument. What’s the deal, what is the contradiction?
Now, listen for yourself, but I don’t think that Colvin was necessarily implying that there was a contradiction - he was just presenting an argument that had been made elsewhere, and asking Moore to comment, which he did, after his initial flurry, by saying that he was in favour of a nationalised health system. Blair, it seems to me, has deliberately twisted this exchange to make it sound as if Moore had dismissed a point of Colvin’s. The fact that Blair has to resort to this sort of falsehood in a weekly column (it might be more forgivable on his blog, where his standards are expected to be lower and his output higher) suggests that Australia’s most popular blogger is struggling for good material to support his anti-ABC crusade.
(And before anyone accuses me of bias, I should point out that my view on the subject of a free trade agreement is probably not too far from Moore’s, which seems to be that one should wait for the details before forming a judgment.)
The Other Dismissal
I was trawling the microfilm in the library this afternoon, looking for the genesis of Liberal Party allegations about ABC bias. I’m not sure I found it, but it was interesting to compare this little archival snatch of the debate then from the debate now.
When Whitlam was sacked, Peter Nixon was installed as caretaker Postmaster-General (the Richard Alston of his time). A day later, he was speaking out:
ABC Needs watchdog, says Nixon
The caretaker Postmaster-General, Mr. Nixon, yesterday renewed his pressure on the ABC with a call of a political “moderator” to monitor the commission’s election coverage.
Mr. Nixon, who has strongly criticised the ABC in the past six months, said the “moderator” was needed to balance “the ABC’s now well established bias towards Labor and the socialist side of politics.”
[…]
Last night Mr Nixon said he believed the ABC should appoint the “moderator” - probably a politically independent member of the judiciary - for the sake of its own credibility and interests.
[…]
Mr Nixon said yesterday’s special one-hour edition of the ABC radio programme AM had been loaded towards the Labor Party.
It had given extraordinary exposure to the Labor side in the dispute by highlighting the Labor-organised reaction to Mr. Whitlam’s dismissal.
[…]
[Former Minister for the Media] Dr. Cass called Mr. Nixon’s suggestion an outrageous attempt to impose a political censor on the ABC, designed to muzzle and intimidate the commission and its staff.
“The Australian people should beware. The totalitarians are on the march,” he said.
The Age, 13 November 1975
In a move that contemporary defenders of the ABC could do well to reprise, Moss Cass came back four days later with some evidence (doing pretty well for a bloke who had to move offices at the same time):
Cass denies bias claim against ABC
The former Minister for the Media, Dr. Cass, yesterday released figures to refute claims that the ABC has been biased towards Labor.
[…]
These figures showed that in October the ABC provided Liberal and National Country Party spokesmen with 30 per cent more time than Labor spokesmen on TV and radio public affairs programmes.
“The ABC’s television public affairs programmes - This Day Tonight, Four Corners, State of the Nation, and Nationwide - devoted 3949 [sic] minutes to L-NCP spokesmen and 267 minutes to Labor spokesmen,” he said.
“The radio public affairs programmes - Am and Pm - devoted 88 minutes to L-NCP spokesmen and 68 minutes to Labor spokesmen.
“That is, the then Opposition received 31 per cent more time on television and 29 per cent more time on radio than the Government of the day.”
The Age, November 17, 1975
(Educated guesswork would indicate that it was actually 349 minutes devoted to L-NCP spokesmen on TV).
I haven’t seen any figures of this kind thrown around in the current debate. Maybe I’ve missed it. I think it’s interesting, though, that (constitutional crisis notwithstanding) Fraser’s opposition was able to get more minutes on ABC TV and radio than Whitlam’s government. I’m pretty sure that one couldn’t say the same about Crean’s opposition today.
I only had time to look through to the end of November, so I wasn’t able to see whether Nixon had any more to say about the ABC later in the election campaign, or whether Cass succeeded in shutting him up for the duration.
Two-Armed Bandit
Well, it turns out that I was wrong. The pokies can be beaten. Just ask Tommy Glen Carmichael, a bushranger for our times (via Gizmodo).
TULSA, Okla. — In the back of a strip-mall workshop a slot machine sits on two green milk crates like a patient on an operating table, its electronic innards exposed. Standing in front of the machine is 53-year-old Tommy Glenn Carmichael, who boasts a unique and lucrative talent:
“Give me a slot machine and I’ll beat it.”
Carmichael is no two-bit slot cheat. Authorities have anointed him one of the best, a master inventor who conspired with an elite group of thieves to steal millions from casinos.
For almost two decades, Carmichael designed tools — the kick stand, the monkey paw, the light wand — that enabled him to bilk slot machines across the United States and Caribbean. Seattle Times, 19 August 2003
Apparently he (and the people to whom he sold his gadgets) stole so much that “[a]gents feared the entire slot industry was in jeapordy”. Nick Xenophon and the No Pokies movement, take note!
I particularly like the part about how he “took seven cruises in six months” in the Caribbean, stealing money from ship casinos. As a former employee of the cruise industry, this brings a sparkle to my eye …
Temporalia
It was 1995 before you could travel from Perth to Brisbane on a single train. To do the trip in 1917, you would have had to change trains six times. I’ve often tried to imagine myself as the colonial bureaucrat responsible for determining the distance between the two parallel rails on which my colony’s trains would run. I would have been making my decision fifty-odd years after Matthew Flinders finished his circumnavigation, so maybe a map of Australia might have found its way onto the walls of my office. Might I have sat there chewing my pencil one day, regarding this map, thought that its wiggly outline was more than a mere abstraction? Might I have put pencil to paper and done a few sums? Might I have realised that with the new-fangled machines, it would become possible to cross the continent relatively easily (a task which had, until then, tended to begin with a camel train and end without), and that my decision was rather critical in bringing that possibility to reality? So far, I’ve been unable to imagine myself ticking a box without stopping to think that it might be a good idea to get on the blower (or even write a letter) to my inter-colonial counterparts and find out which box they were going to tick.
About fifty years later, some bozo in England was making a similar decision. The carts and wagons had always moved slowly enough that it didn’t matter too much which side of the road they chose to drive on. There was always plenty of time to steer around any oncoming hazard. If worst came to worst, the horses themselves would tend to take the task of self-preservation fairly seriously. Not so the new automobiles, though. Something had to be done. Needless to say, it was done, and done without bringing the French Ambassador in for a yarn about what side they were planning to drive on.
I could write another paragraph about VHS v Beta, and one about Y2K, and one about DVD-RW v DVD+RW. It seems even now, even when an issue positively begs for sensible consensus-making, those at the cutting edge show an uncanny ability for fucking it up. Today, another example.
When I pay my dollar-fifty (or whatever it is) and ring up the talking clock, I take its advice to be authoritative. Not so. According to this article in today’s Age, it’s only one of several competing understandings of what the time actually is.
It seems that in 1967, “atomic clocks replaced the motion of the Earth as the world’s official timekeeper.” The Earth subsequently (and, no doubt, annoyingly for all concerned) slowed down. Most annoyed were the astronomers, who found that they could no longer rely on the talking clock to tell them which direction to point their telescopes, since co-ordinated universal time no longer correlated exactly to the rotation of the Earth. The International Telecommunication Union (whose job, it would seem, is to set the talking clock) did them a favour and started adding a leap second here and there to make the clocks match the world again.
Which seems straightforward enough, except for one major problem. The network of global positioning satellites (which, amongst other important jobs, allow aircraft to avoid running into each other) are calibrated to a different atomic clock, which was set in 1980 and left to run ever since. The leap seconds which have been added on to co-ordinated universal time have not been added on to the GPS clocks. At the moment, GPS is thirteen seconds ahead. That might not sound like much until you’ve watched the planes taking off and landing at Heathrow Airport (that is, to watch one plane landing as another takes off, on the same runway). It would only take a few more leap seconds and a sleepy aircraft controller to look at the wrong clock, and things could get hairy.
While all this is happening, there’s yet another kind of time, called international atomic time, which “is based on atomic clocks and ignores leap seconds.” That seems harmless enough to me, as long as no-one’s using that time for any really important jobs, but it does beg one question. These atomic clocks, as I understand it, work by taking advantage of one of the resonant frequencies of the caesium atom, a little over nine billion Hertz. Basically, you work out how many times the atom will vibrate in a second, calibrate an oscillator to it, then count the oscillations and divide by the frequency to count the seconds.
Now, what I don’t get is this: “The problem arises because the Earth cannot keep time as accurately as modern atomic clocks”. That seems dumb to me. What it really means is that the Earth can’t keep time as regularly as atomic clocks. But when it comes down to it, the time that matters to us (whether we’re astronomers or not) is Earth time. It’s the time that the sun can be expected to rise and set, etc. Now, I’m sure an atomic clock is a terrific way to keep track of Earth time (seeing as they’re accurate to about a second every million years, or so), but given that Earth time shifts just a little, wouldn’t it make sense for the atomic clocks to shift with it? Otherwise, what is this super-accurate time that the clocks are measuring? It’s the number of times that an atom has vibrated. I’m sure there is some point to that, but the article doesn’t explain what it is.
The thing is, when they were building these atomic clocks, they obviously measured the resonant frequency of the caesium atom, and figured out that it vibrated back and forth 9,192,631,770 times per second. But, if you think about it, if the Earth’s rotation has slowed, a second (i.e. a particular proportion of the Earth’s rotation) has become longer. If they counted up the vibrations today, and measured them against clocks that are still celestially calibrated, they’d presumably count one or two more vibrations before the stopwatch clicked over. So my question is this: instead of stuffing around with leap seconds, why not make the denominator, the number by which the count of vibrations is divided, variable? Then the clocks would be able to accurately keep Earth time, instead of constantly being either ahead or behind of the only scale that really makes any difference. I’m pretty sure that some smart bugger could even sit down and work out in advance what changes were going to be needed and when. And the big bonus would be that, for once, we’d have a single standard that everyone was happy with.
(I write all of this while being fully prepared to defer to anyone who, unlike me, has any expertise in this subject. I’m presenting my thoughts on the premise that relatively few atomic physicists read this blog, but of course, the internet never loses its capacity to surprise.)
Outrage?
Presumably Andrew Bolt and his cohorts will be up in arms about this transparent attempt to make the suicide problem look worse than it is:
A LOST GENERATION An alarming number of men aged 25 to 54 are choosing death as a solution to crises in their lives. The Age, 18 August 2003
A “Lost Generation”? That’s ridiculous! It’s not a generation at all. It’s not one in three. It’s not even one in ten! What an outrageous slur upon men aged 25 to 54. Why can’t they admit that our society is more contented than suicidal? Why this blatant attempt to smother the facts in emotive terminology? What are they trying to hide?
(Sorry if I seem to trivialise an issue that’s anything but trivial. Unlike those I’m parodying, I’m not trying to make the problem seem less important than it is.)
Seriously, though, I think the authors should have had a second look at this sentence:
In effect, the generation that were killing themselves as young men years ago, are now committing suicide as adults.
I know what they’re trying to say, but really …
Diversion
It was a bit of a late starter, but an interesting debate between Alan Anderson and myself has sprung up on this post (which, to some extent, explains the paucity of actual posts here in the last week or so). If you’ve missed it, and if you’ve got a few minutes and a well-greased scroll wheel, it’s worth a look. Contributions are, as always, welcome.
New Right Neurosis
This could be grist to the ploggers’ mill for a long time to come, methinks.
A study funded by the US Government has concluded that conservatism can be explained psychologically as a set of neuroses rooted in “fear and aggression, dogmatism and the intolerance of ambiguity”.
Finally the pinko leftie communards will have some scientifically-verified insults to throw back: “You’re just a frightened, agressive, dogmatic neurotic! Ner ner na ner ner!”
Altissimo
Those of us who were geeky enough to follow such things when it was still geeky to follow such things (and before there was ever a section in the newspaper devoted to them) remember the legal snarling that took place between Microsoft and Apple over the concept of the mouse-driven GUI and who stole what from whom. Windows and clicks and drags and icons are so ubiquitous now that it seems silly to argue about it, but back then they were a pretty hot idea. It was customary at the time for the better-informed technophiles to dismiss the argument by pointing out that the idea originally came from Xerox, before they became synonymous with the photocopier. Today I stumbled across this reprint of an article that appeared in Byte magazine in September 1981, talking about the Xerox Alto, the machine in question. It’s amazing how quaint so much of the text is, considering that it was only just over twenty years ago, but there is some pretty startling prescience, too.
Naturally, it was a pretty big deal that
[t]he screen may be broken up into windows, and each window may be accessed in a different manner, if desired. Many Alto programs use only the mouse and screen windows for program control. […] A file may be deleted simply by touching the file name with the cursor, then touching the Delete spot on the screen with the cursor. As the cursor enters a new window, it may change shape, perhaps appearing as an arrow in one window and a paintbrush in another.
A character set may be created by a user and displayed on the screen. Mixed fonts are allowed so that text of various sizes and shapes may be simultaneously displayed on the screen.
If you’ve only started using computers in the last ten years or so, you’ve probably never used one with a monochrome screen and no graphics capability (bearing in mind that these days even the text that you’re typing is really graphics, which is how you’re able to see different fonts and bold and italic and so forth, which we never could back then). It might be hard for you to understand how revolutionary this stuff would have seemed.
And speaking of capabilities that we take for granted, the keyboard was new, too:
Each key has its own signal line in the keyboard interface, which allows a program to take advantage of the possibility of “chord” commands, where the user holds down one or more keys. For example, Shift-Control-E is as easy for the Alto to read as A-B-C
But that was nothing compared with the invention of the mouse, with its enigmatically-named buttons:
The mouse is a small box with three buttons on the top and several ball bearings on the bottom. A slender cable connects the mouse to the Alto keyboard. The buttons are named red, yellow, and blue, although the physical buttons are all black. The mouse is typically held in the user’s right hand and rolled along the table on a soft piece of plastic that provides traction for the ball bearings.
Movement is detected by the motion of one of the ball bearings. The mouse reports changes in position to the Alto. From this, a cursor on the Alto display can be positioned. The physical position of the mouse on the table is unimportant, since only the change in position is reported.
And of course, the construction was minimalist, not to mention inexpensive:
Each Alto is housed in a beautifully formed, textured beige metal cabinet that hints at its $32,000 price tag. With the exception of the disk storage/processor box, everything is designed to sit on a desk or tabletop.
[…]
The processor and disk storage for the Alto are contained in a rack about the size of a waist-high filing cabinet. Each Alto has two 3-megabyte disk drives. The drives themselves resemble small pizza ovens and are often referred to in this manner.
You’ve got to give credit to the Byte columnist, though. Not only did he come to grips with the GUI and the mouse and the whole notion of a computer with such lithe dimensions, he had a pretty good eye for other rather significant potential:
A stand-alone Alto is usable, but the best configuration is a group of Altos connected by an Ethernet system. Since the Ethernet system is a local network, a special device called a gateway was developed to allow local Ethernet networks to speak to other Ethernet networks or packet networks of other types. Many companies are researching network schemes that would allow packet transmission across cable-television lines. Since these cables are currently installed in many homes and buildings, it is not difficult to imagine a city with an “information grid,” analogous to the electric-power grid that exists today. Combined with an electronic mail system (a prototype called Laurel is used on Altos today) the possibilities are staggering.